A familiar pattern is playing out inside the Dallas County courthouse as the district attorney’s office battles with a judge amid talk of a grand jury investigation of that jurist.

The fight began earlier this month in a family violence case handled by Criminal Court Judge Elizabeth Frizell. Depending on who’s talking, paperwork in the case either never existed, was lost or destroyed.

Defense attorney David Finn believes the dispute is a power grab by the DA’s office. But top prosecutors say it’s a political ploy by Finn to taint District Attorney Craig Watkins before the November election where the DA will face former judge Susan Hawk.

They say Finn is exploiting past DA run-ins with judges to help Hawk, a Republican. Previously, Watkins had grand juries investigate three other Dallas County female judges — all fellow Democrats — Angela King, Julia Hayes and Lena Levario.

“It’s a power play vis-à-vis Angela King, vis-à-vis Julia Hayes,” Finn said. “We’ve got a DA who wants to control every single aspect of every single case. He wants to control an independent judiciary.”

Heath Harris, Watkins’ top assistant, said Finn is using the “zealous disagreement” between Frizell and prosecutors, which he says happens every day, as political theater.

The acrimony between Harris and Finn reached a boiling point Monday when a bailiff had to physically separate the two inside a courtroom.

Frizell, an unopposed Democrat in the November election for a felony court bench, declined to comment.

Tammy Kemp, a supervising prosecutor who oversees the family violence division, laughed at the suggestion that Watkins was trying to control judges.

“Nobody’s that good of a micromanager. If we’re always in agreement, that’s when you get the fake drug scandal,” she said, or “30, almost 40 men wrongly convicted.”

Kemp, a Democrat, is unopposed in her November bid to take a felony court bench. In March, she defeated state District Judge Lena Levario, a judge Watkins had an adversarial relationship with after she held him in contempt for refusing to testify about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct against him. The contempt charge was later dismissed.

The genesis of the current discord involves a fight at an Irving mall in February 2013.

LaToya Scott, 26, saw her ex-girlfriend with another woman and began attacking the other woman, prosecutors said. The ex-girlfriend got a scratch behind her ear as she tried to intervene. Scott was charged with a misdemeanor family violence assault.

In April, Scott was scheduled to plead guilty in exchange for probation.

What happened next is the core of the fight in Frizell’s courtroom. Prosecutors say the plea went through and the paperwork should reflect that. Finn said the plea didn’t happen because Scott told the judge that she did not hurt her ex-girlfriend. Finn said that in court Frizell also said she remembered not accepting the plea.

Prosecutor Jason Hermus said it is “highly irregular” that the paperwork is not part of the case file but declined to elaborate.

Finn said that in court, prosecutors indicated the paperwork may have been destroyed, but “Judge Frizell vehemently denied the accusation.”

Finn said that prosecutor Becky Dodds spoke disrespectfully to the judge, ran out of the courtroom to avoid going to trial and tried to make Frizell hold her in contempt. A grand jury investigation into Judges Hayes and King began after Hayes held a prosecutor in contempt, even though Hayes later withdrew it.

Dodds said Tuesday that she never ran out of the courtroom. She said she left one day at lunchtime for a doctor’s appointment after a hearing had ended. She said that she never tried to be held in contempt.

“I would never walk out on a judge and be disrespectful,” said Dodds. “It was a disagreement. It doesn’t mean there was any disrespect involved.”

On Tuesday, prosecutors and Finn agreed to dismiss Scott’s cases if she completes anger management classes, drug education and community service.

Sitting in the courtroom Tuesday, Scott admitted she made a “bad decision.” She also said she was dismayed by her experiences with the criminal justice system.

“It’s unbelievable, the way the prosecutors acted, the way they disrespected the judge and the court,” said Scott, sitting next to her mother. The criminal justice system, she said, “is the way I’ve always seen it: corrupt. But then you have Judge Frizell and David Finn and the clerks and the people in courtroom trying to do the right thing. ”

The fallout from the case may not be over.

Dallas County public defender Loren Collins testified this week that he spoke with a prosecutor about a grand jury possibly looking into the actions of Frizell and one of her clerks, Finn said.

Collins declined to comment Tuesday. Collins represented Scott until learning that the public defender’s office had a conflict in the case because it had represented a witness.

The district attorney’s office on Tuesday denied in an interview that there is a grand jury investigation into Frizell.

Finn said that at the very least the DA’s office was using the threat of a grand jury as an attempt to control Frizell.

“The DA’s office wanted to create the impression that it was a possibility if she didn’t go their way,” Finn said.